Dr.Tori Herridge

Presenting

Presenting

Dr. Tori Herridge is a palaeobiologist and dwarf elephant expert, and the presenter of Channel 4's Britain at Low Tide and Walking Through Time. She has autopsied a real, frozen and somewhat-bloody woolly mammoth (Woolly Mammoth: the Autopsy, Channel 4/ How to Clone a Woolly Mammoth, The Smithsonian Channel), and a full-scale, and *very* bloody, model of a Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex Autopsy, National Geographic). And she has followed in the footsteps of Hannibal to find out an army of elephants made it across the Alps (Hannibal: The New Evidence, Secret History, Channel 4).

Tori's scientific research is all about tiny elephants and what they can teach us about evolution. She identified the world’s smallest mammoth (it used to live on Crete, and was only just over 1m-tall as an adult, in case you were wondering), and uses the diaries and maps of pioneering 19th and early 20th century palaeontologists, to follow in their footsteps and re-discover their fossil sites so that modern research methods can be used to uncover their palaeontological secrets. Thanks to funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and the University of York, Tori continues this work with an international team of scientists, combining museum research with field work that involves scrambling down sea-cliffs and exploring caves on Sicily, Malta, Crete and Cyprus.

Tori is passionate about improving diversity in science, and opening up scientific research to all. She co-founded and co-runs the website TrowelBlazers (trowelblazers.com), telling the stories of pioneering women in archaeology, geology and palaeontology, and is co-founder and joint Editor-in-Chief of the first ever open (free) access scientific journal for Quaternary Science, Open Quaternary.